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Widow creep like a spider into my head.
    I showed Bill Jr. into the garden and started putting together a cheese and cracker plate. I was cutting the cheddar into very thin slices to make it look like there was more of it when I heard the Muertomobile drawing up to the house. It was not a sound you could mistake; its engine rumbled like the organ in Satan’s front parlor.
    Houston is a funny town; superstition and heavy industry have had strange sweaty couplings amid the oil refineries and shipyards, and produced some very weird offspring. There have been spirit cars here for twenty-five years, altogether stranger beasts than the regular low riders, but the Muertomobile outclassed them all. Carlos had salvaged a ’62 GM-built hearse, dropped the body down to the legal limit for low riders, and then set about patiently encrusting it with artifacts of power. Seven star-shaped clusters, each made from thirteen silver dollars, demarcated the Muertomobile’s zones of power. Its white staring eyes were ringed with polished shells, and a bleached calf’s skull served as the hood ornament. The body of the car was coated in photographs of Carlos’s ancestors; hundreds of them, all in frames of wood or bronze or plastic or porcelain or pewter or silver, most glued down flat, but some dozen propped to stand upright, such as the great gold-framed portrait of his maternal grandparents that stood proudly on the roof of the hearse, just over the driver’s side of the windshield.
    Inside the car every surface was swathed in crushed red velvet of the sort you imagine in the bottom of Dracula’s coffin. The red air was full of dancing men; skeletons and crucifixes of every description hung from the ceiling, trembling and bouncing on a spider’s forest of thin black threads. It was not at all comforting to have Carlos driving behind you, late at night. His souped-up halogen high beams were a white, annihilating stare; he himself was only a black shadow surrounded by a deep red light that welled from the windshield like the afterglow of hell.
    â€œCandy! Carlos is—”
    â€œI know, I know.” She stomped in from the garden. “That damn car is scaring all the grackles up out of the trees. I hope they cover it in birdshit.” She pursed and puckered her lips, brushed back her hair, and checked to make sure her slip wasn’t showing. “How do I look?”
    Like a centerfold for the Funeral Home Girls of the South pictorial, I didn’t say. Outside, the bank-vault doors of the Muertomobile swung shut. “Not bad. A little too pretty, I think. La Gonzales would like to see you a bit more crazy with grief, but—”
    â€œScrew the old hag, I don’t care—shit, there they are!” Candy checked the coffee and boxes of pastries set out on the long table, smoothed her dress, and opened the door.
    â€œ Buenos días, Señora Gonzales,” she said, gravely bobbing her head. “Carlos.”
    â€œAn’ what’s good about it?” asked La Gonzales, stepping heavily through the door ahead of her son. She had a figure like Queen Victoria in her later years. Her forearms were the size of loaves of bread, her knees were hardened from a lifetime of kneeling at early morning Mass. La Gonzales had raised nine children and buried two husbands. Her hair was still as dark as a widow’s veil, her crow’s eyes black and bright and sharp. “Carlos, put those dishes on the table.”
    â€œ Sí, Mamá. ” Carlos cleaned up rather well. His mother had bullied him out of his usual undershirt and jeans; instead, he wore an old double-breasted black suit of his father’s. His beard was trimmed and the line of hoops had come out of his left ear. His only remaining piece of jewelry was a necklace on which was threaded a spark plug from his first car, which he had crashed into a bayou at age seventeen. Miraculously he had escaped nearly unhurt, and